Abstract
This new addition to Polity’s Resources series is an excellent springboard into thinking with and beyond established accounts of living data. The series title is, I understand, meant to play on the idea of ‘resources’ in two ways: books within the series provide a focused account of the intensifying socio-economic, political and cultural changes crystallising around certain emerging or dwindling resources and also act as ‘go to’ introductory resources to core conceptual debates. With this in mind, Parry and Greenhough are to be applauded for writing a thorough and approachable contribution that successfully speaks to both of these registers.
Bioinformation, we are told, ‘refers to all information, no matter how constituted, arising from analyses of biological organisms and their behaviour, that can be used to elucidate their structure or function, identify individuals, or differentiate them from each other’ (p. 8). A valuable and footloose resource enters into the world at the interstices of these applications. Drawing upon historical and contemporary examples – from the birth of forensic fingerprinting to DNA sequencing and beyond – the authors explore how this resource that seems, at first thought, intangible or even techno-utopian is becoming something that all of us (consciously or not) are increasingly invested in. The challenge with exploring an emerging resource like bioinformation is that it is inherently multiple, both ‘wordy’ and ‘fleshy’ in equal measure. Medical records and DNA sequences are key articulations discussed here, but we also read of how these circulating versions of bioinformation are made to cooperate in the name of innovation and profit. Extensive paper archives of routine newborn blood blots, for example, combine dried biosamples of genetic material with personal medical data and have now been re-purposed in some contexts as inadvertent (forensic) biobanks.
The book itself is split into six chapters and, for this reviewer, these could be loosely bundled into three thematic sections. The first, around the introductory chapter (titled ‘Genesis’), introduces bioinformation and situates the volume and the resource within existing literatures concerning biopolitics, commodification and vital geographies. The next three substantive chapters – ‘Provenance’, ‘Property’ and ‘Market’ – introduce detailed contemporary debates around the production, ownership and consumption of bioinformation. The final two chapters are more forward-looking and deal with Big Data and ‘the datafication of everything’. The politics of data will be familiar to many as a growing concern within geography. Here, though, the authors deal perceptively with the legal, ethical and social consequences of the ‘datafication’ of the biological realm, particularly now that it is considered an important growth frontier. What are the personal consequences of this for those whose bioinformation is now stored, circulated and sold often without their explicit consent? What form should any social contract between ‘contributors’ and ‘custodians’ of this resource take? The authors conclude by mapping out emerging responses to these questions, and coupled with the extensive discussion of selected readings at the end of the volume, these provocations will undoubtedly be a valuable launchpad for those seeking to explore these vital questions for themselves.
